Today Earth and Mars will be closer together than
at any time during the last 12 years. Stargazers won't want to
miss the Red Planet blazing bright in the midnight sky.

June
21, 2001 -- Check most any astronomer's 2001 calendar and
you'll find June 21st circled. It's a big day for astronomy!
For starters, June 21st marks the beginning of northern summer
and the longest day of the year north of the equator. The Sun
will climb to its highest point in the sky at 7:38 UT (3:38 EDT),
a moment known as the summer
solstice.

Then, just a few hours later, something extraordinary will
happen to that solstice Sun. With hundreds of astronomers watching
intently, the New Moon will slide across our star's fiery disk
for a
rare total solar eclipse. The Sun's ghostly corona will dance
across the sky for nearly four minutes -- but, alas, only over
southern Africa where the narrow path of totality makes landfall.

If you're among the billions who will miss the eclipse
in remote Africa, don't despair. There's one more astronomical
wonder on June 21st that anyone can enjoy: a close encounter
with the planet Mars.

Earth and Mars have been growing steadily closer for months,
and today around 0615 UT the two worlds will lie only 0.45 AU
(67 million km) apart -- the nearest they've been in a dozen
years. Mars is simply dazzling when it's so close to Earth, and
finding it is easy, says astronomy professor George Lebo, a NASA
Summer Faculty Fellow at the Marshall Space Flight Center. "Simply
go outside between 10 pm and 2 am local time," he says,
"and look toward the south. Mars is brighter than any other
star in the sky and it has a distinctive reddish-orange color
-- you can't miss it."

Mars rises in the east around sunset and can be seen for most
of the night. But as Lebo suggests, the hours around midnight
offer the best view, because that's when the Red Planet is highest
in the sky. Midnight sky watchers at mid-northern latitudes will
spot Mars hovering about 30 degrees above the southern horizon.
For southern hemisphere stargazers, Mars will lie almost directly
overhead.

Above: The southern sky shortly around midnight on June
21, 2001. Copper-hued Mars shines at visual magnitude -2.3 between
the constellations Sagittarius and Scorpius. Don't confuse Mars
with Antares (Ares is another name for Mars, Antares means "anti-Mars"),
the red first magnitude star in Scorpius.

Even city dwellers with troublesome light pollution can spot
the planet. Blazing at visual magnitude -2.3, Mars will outshine
everything in the sky except Venus and the Sun itself. The Moon
will be New on June 21st (and busy blocking out the Sun in southern
Africa), so Mars will be even brighter than Earth's satellite.

If
you happen to be watching Mars with dark-adapted eyes from an
extremely dark site, be sure to look at the ground around you.
Can you see a faint shadow? The light outlining your silhouette
could be from Mars! It's not every day you can see your "Mars
shadow," but this week is a good time to try.

Right: Earth and Mars are on the same side of the Sun
this month. They were aligned most directly on June 13th --a
date astronomers call opposition
-- but the pair won't make their closest approach until 8 days
later, on June 21st, because of the substantial eccentricity
of Mars' orbit. [learn
more]

Mars will remain blazing bright for weeks to come, fading
slowly as northern summer wanes and fall approaches. Throughout
the coming months the Red Planet will linger in a region of the
sky that's home to the very center of our galaxy. This will be
a treat for dark sky observers who can see the faint Milky Way,
a hazy band of stars that bisects the sky along the galactic
plane. The Milky Way cuts through the teapot-shaped constellation
Sagittarius and brightens near its spout -- right by Mars. There
lies the
galactic center, the lair of a supermassive black hole around
which our entire pinwheel galaxy spins. (Don't
bother looking for the black hole, you can't see that!)

Of course, Mars and the galactic center are very far apart
despite their seeming proximity. A spacecraft from Earth traveling
at light speed would arrive at the Red Planet in only a few minutes.
Reaching the inner regions of our galaxy would take an extra
30,000 years!

Above: This annotated map of the constellation Sagittarius
shows the galactic center and the approximate location of Mars
this month. The galactic center lies behind a think veil of absorbing
dust in the galactic plane. Nearby "Baade's Window"
is a relatively dust-poor region that allows some of the light
from the innermost galaxy to shine through. Click to enlarge.

We don't yet have spacecraft that can travel so fast, but
you can still visit Mars at the speed of light -- through a telescope.
The nearby Red Planet will be a whopping 21 arcseconds across
this week and next. "One arcsecond is a tiny angle, about
the size of a dime viewed from a distance of 1.5 miles,"
explains Lebo. "Even twenty-one arcseconds is small to the
unaided eye, but it's plenty big for telescopes." This week
a modest six-inch reflecting telescope could reveal normally
invisible details including martian clouds and icy polar caps.
See Sky and Telescope's "A
Grand Return of Mars" for more information.

If you don't own a telescope, looking at Mars with your unaided
eye is still a wonderful way to enjoy this planetary close encounter.
So don't wait. Mars is out there now, fiery red and beckoning
from your own back yard!